A Dual-Band CMOS MIMO Radio SoC for IEEE 802.11n Wireless LAN

Abstract

The demand for higher data rate and longer range in wireless data networks has propelled the rapid commercialization of the IEEE 802.11n draft 2.0 standard [1], with over 80 WiFi-certified MIMO products to date. By employing spatial diversity, 802.11n MIMO radios can provide increased data rate, robustness, and range, while occupying the same 20 or 40MHz signal bandwidth as legacy 802.11a/b/g WLAN [2,3]. This paper introduces a fully integrated 2×2 two-stream MIMO radio SoC that integrates all of the functions of an 802.11n WLAN. The 0.13μm CMOS radio SoC, which integrates two dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) RF transceivers, analog baseband filters, data converters, digital physical layer, media access controller, and a PCI Express interface, provides a low-cost low-power small-form-factor WLAN solution.